Class A power amps and electricity crisis..

adyc

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This got me looking at energy usage. I was surprised an electric car uses about 345 watts per mile. I though this low. If you drive 10,000 miles a year, that is 3,250,000 watts.

A 300 watt dissipating class A amp on 24 x 365 is 2,628,000

An HVAC is about 3500 watts per hour. In a warm state that is about 10 hours run time per day for say 182 days. Thats about 6,370,000 watts. That is assuming the home is about 2400 feet.
Heating a cooling is the mass power usage. Most homes I see in warmer states have more than 1 AC. They have 2 to 5. So the load is more like 12 to 18 million watts for summer. That does not include heat or cool in the winter.

At $1kW, that is $2,628 to idle an amp.
At $.12kW as is much of the US, that is $315. Thats $26 a month. Most audiophile have money enough to let their system run for $26 a month.

For perspective, your desktop computer uses at least 200 Watts per hour. I leave mine on 24 x 365. That is 1,752,000 watts. I bet your Taiko uses more than 200. I bet your DAC is also 200. We leave those on 24x365. Why pick on the amp when you digital front end is probably using close to twice what a class A amp uses. And about the same as what your home computer uses.
Please note that watt(W) is power: energy/time. Watt-hour(Wh) is energy. An electric car uses 345 Wh per mile not 345 W per mile.
 
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cjf

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I've owned some well respected Class D Amps. I still own a Class D DIY Hypex NCore NC400 amp for the bedroom system. I've also owned Class A/B amps and a few pure Class A amps as well. My current amp is of the pure Class A variety and in terms of SQ, it trumps all previous amps in my system to date.

I dont see myself ever going back to any other amp topology at this point. They may be the Audiophile equivalent to "Rolling Coal" in a diesel truck but IME its hard to beat them in terms of SQ.

I do power mine off every day and it only takes about 1hr for them to come up to ideal listening performance. I suspect my environmental impact is peanuts in the grand scheme of things.
 

Charlie B.

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I bet your Taiko uses more than 200. I bet your DAC is also 200. We leave those on 24x365. Why pick on the amp when you digital front end is probably using close to twice what a class A amp uses.
My Lampizator Pacific DAC is rated at 40Wh. (https://www.lampizatorpoland.com/_files/ugd/c6db56_666638befd88429d98e43bd79258ba6b.pdf?index=true) Standby should be less...
My Ypsilon Aelius II are rated each 250Wh idle per mono block. (https://ypsilonelectronics.com/aelius-monoblock/)
My Innuos Zenith Mk3 is rated at 15W peak. (https://innuos.com/zenith/)
You are probably right about Taiko Extreme.
 
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Manos_Bits

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Worse, they had DIY cords!!!
seriously talking , I am planning to upgrade my DIY cables by adding dog's fart gas to improve coloring and newspaper insulation to enrich articulation..
 

Manos_Bits

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Charlie B.

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Tuckers

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One of the requirements for my audio system is power efficiency, and I've followed this for over 10 years. No more tubes, no more Class A or even B. I look at power consumption of every component, and I measure it vs the published specs. Currently my audio system (everything except my TV) draws about 60 watts at idle and doesn't use more than 200 watts when pushed. Power used at idle is one of the first specs I look at when considering a component. I've measured and know the power draw of almost everything in my home.

This is something I've taken up as a personal responsibility, and I'm happy with my choices.

I just got Ralf Karsten's new Atma-Sphere Class D monoblocks which are incredibly efficient, idling at 5 watts each, and they are sounding incredibly promising.

I think creating audio magic can come in many different forms!
 

Tuckers

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I applaud Luxman for taking on power efficiency as a requirement for future products. I have no doubt that whatever they bring to market will be an improvement to their previous Class A designs. Multiply that efficiency by the total number of devices they will sell in the market, and wil have an impact.

If audiophiles begin to value efficiency more, it will drive more innovation and better sound.
 
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the sound of Tao

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This got me looking at energy usage. I was surprised an electric car uses about 345 watts per mile. I though this low. If you drive 10,000 miles a year, that is 3,250,000 watts.

A 300 watt dissipating class A amp on 24 x 365 is 2,628,000

An HVAC is about 3500 watts per hour. In a warm state that is about 10 hours run time per day for say 182 days. Thats about 6,370,000 watts. That is assuming the home is about 2400 feet.
Heating a cooling is the mass power usage. Most homes I see in warmer states have more than 1 AC. They have 2 to 5. So the load is more like 12 to 18 million watts for summer. That does not include heat or cool in the winter.

At $1kW, that is $2,628 to idle an amp.
At $.12kW as is much of the US, that is $315. Thats $26 a month. Most audiophile have money enough to let their system run for $26 a month.

For perspective, your desktop computer uses at least 200 Watts per hour. I leave mine on 24 x 365. That is 1,752,000 watts. I bet your Taiko uses more than 200. I bet your DAC is also 200. We leave those on 24x365. Why pick on the amp when you digital front end is probably using close to twice what a class A amp uses. And about the same as what your home computer uses.
Rex we do tend to think in terms of energy use being just about the operational energy use… but if we’re trying to get a true picture of sum energy usage in a full life cycle assessment sense we should also be factoring in embodied energy, that is the energy used to create the product and to get it implemented before we ever start to use it.

With countries signing onto net zero greenhouse inventories user pays for true costs of the life cycle energy impacts of products or services becomes far more likely so we can expect costs for embodied energy will start to factor in the costs of component ownership.

Embodied or embedded energy varies by such a large degree for different materials and in the context of their sourcing and processing requirements. Usually embedded or embodied energy factors a large deal in the hidden true costs of the production of anything… we don’t really pay the true cost of production for anything and have just left it to future generations to cover those hidden costs… so carbon produced and environmental damage is offset into someone else’s future costs. Now we are starting to see the costs in terms of increasing costs of living from long term environmental costs.

So a passenger car (be it internal combustion or hybrid electric) has fairly huge embodied energy in creation phase. According to the translational ecology blog from the Nicholas School of Environment at Duke University says that David MacKay of the University of Cambridge estimates that the embodied energy in the average car amounts to about 76000 kWhr. That is equivalent to about five years of total electricity used in a 3200-square-foot house in Durham, NC. Also mentioned in this was in overall terms approximately a third of total energy usage on the planet is embedded in the production and the implementation phase of the energy usage cycle.

What factors play out in embodied energy. There is GER (gross energy requirements) or PER (process energy requirements). GER is truer and harder to calculate and the higher figure because it includes all PER but also all the other energy inputs beyond process. It’s not unusual to see GER to be twice as high as the PER.

In electronics cutting edge microprocessors are notoriously high in embedded energy requirements because they are so incredibly process intensive. Old school simpler tech like class a SET tube amps would tend to have far less energy intensive production requirements.

Apple’s LCA data on life cycle assessment and embodied energy for electronics published for their Mac computers and laptops used as some guide for the kinds of energy requirements for manufacture of contemporary IC intensive products such as solid state amplifiers and dacs that the PER process energy requirements for manufacture is often more than half of the sum energy of the total life energy use of the component and often outstrips operational energy. If we went then to a more true reflection using GER and factored that GER is considerably greater again it’s likely the figures for high tech contemporary electronics could well scale the total energy usage for manufacture and also operation of a solid state class d well past the life cycle energy requirements of a comparatively simpler tech class A tube amp.

A life cycle energy audit and proper carbon accounting would be a better reflection of the true circumstances on total energy use of any of this gear. Until we have that we’re just guessing about any true energy efficiency.
 
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Argonaut

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I shall be acquiring one of these, should anyone wish to visit and hear the system they can jolly well peddle for it ;)

 
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Kingrex

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Rex we do tend to think in terms of energy use being just about the operational energy use… but if we’re trying to get a true picture of sum energy usage in a full life cycle assessment sense we should also be factoring in embodied energy, that is the energy used to create the product and to get it implemented before we ever start to use it.

With countries signing onto net zero greenhouse inventories user pays for true costs of the life cycle energy impacts of products or services becomes far more likely so we can expect costs for embodied energy will start to factor in the costs of component ownership.

Embodied or embedded energy varies by such a large degree for different materials and in the context of their sourcing and processing requirements. Usually embedded or embodied energy factors a large deal in the hidden true costs of the production of anything… we don’t really pay the true cost of production for anything and have just left it to future generations to cover those hidden costs… so carbon produced and environmental damage is offset into someone else’s future costs. Now we are starting to see the costs in terms of increasing costs of living from long term environmental costs.

So a passenger car (be it internal combustion or hybrid electric) has fairly huge embodied energy in creation phase. According to the translational ecology blog from the Nicholas School of Environment at Duke University says that David MacKay of the University of Cambridge estimates that the embodied energy in the average car amounts to about 76000 kWhr. That is equivalent to about five years of total electricity used in a 3200-square-foot house in Durham, NC. Also mentioned in this was in overall terms approximately a third of total energy usage on the planet is embedded in the production and the implementation phase of the energy usage cycle.

What factors play out in embodied energy. There is GER (gross energy requirements) or PER (process energy requirements). GER is truer and harder to calculate and the higher figure because it includes all PER but also all the other energy inputs beyond process. It’s not unusual to see GER to be twice as high as the PER.

In electronics cutting edge microprocessors are notoriously high in embedded energy requirements because they are so incredibly process intensive. Old school simpler tech like class a SET tube amps would tend to have far less energy intensive production requirements.

Apple’s LCA data on life cycle assessment and embodied energy for electronics published for their Mac computers and laptops used as some guide for the kinds of energy requirements for manufacture of contemporary IC intensive products such as solid state amplifiers and dacs that the PER process energy requirements for manufacture is often more than half of the sum energy of the total life energy use of the component and often outstrips operational energy. If we went then to a more true reflection using GER and factored that GER is considerably greater again it’s likely the figures for high tech contemporary electronics could well scale the total energy usage for manufacture and also operation of a solid state class d well past the life cycle energy requirements of a comparatively simpler tech class A tube amp.

A life cycle energy audit and proper carbon accounting would be a better reflection of the true circumstances on total energy use of any of this gear. Until we have that we’re just guessing about any true energy efficiency.
Very well.spoken and a highly overlooked aspect of all material and energy.production. I have been involved in the management of some Intel chip plants as well as data centers. Chip plants in particular are incredibly dense and complex in tools and materials. The plant that produce those tools are from dense and complex plants. And so on. So yes, the gross energy cost of what appears to be a low energy consumption product can make that low energy products total consumption of energy very high.
 

Alrainbow

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Dec 11, 2013
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The part of any claims of green or zero greenhouse release is also the biggest lie and misconception
there is no zero nor even a complete zero in attempting one.
to better understand this the term zero should be removed from this concept
it’s far more accurate to show a net change. But even a change is complex

an example is we are told a E car is zero emissions wow god has made our world perfect suddenly
how can anything we make happen or be created in a zero environment
a E car does emit carbon but does this not directly from the car
as it’s made it’s a pig in emissions
as it’s charged it’s also a pig
the batteries have a definite life span and then what happens

I think if we just used google to see what is the total carbon foot print of an E car from making , using it and then finally to remove it
it becomes obvious this is a big waist of money to a bad end for the earth
one more item to consider
the entire concept of green is only based on greenhouse gas
where is the rest of the pollution and E car causes
while being made imigine the chemicals no one talks about
 
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the sound of Tao

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Very well.spoken and a highly overlooked aspect of all material and energy.production. I have been involved in the management of some Intel chip plants as well as data centers. Chip plants in particular are incredibly dense and complex in tools and materials. The plant that produce those tools are from dense and complex plants. And so on. So yes, the gross energy cost of what appears to be a low energy consumption product can make that low energy products total consumption of energy very high.
That aspect you point to about even the producing of the tools to make these new high tech components as incredibly intensive manufacture is a great example of the difference between GER (gross energy requirements) and PER (process energy requirements).

With GER even the energy used and carbon created in the designing phase of a chip where you can have a large team of people housed in a high tech building full of computers and servers working full time for a year on designing just one chip has to be accounted for. We are just starting to get our heads around the true carbon cost of production.

Full embedded energy costs are massive audits and calculations for all the processes for complex contemporary technologies to engineer ever more complex and more demanding approaches. We are constantly trying to pack more in and chasing higher performance in smaller E goods so more and more industries working with cutting edge nanotechnologies are incredibly energy intensive pursuits originated at a time when energy was relatively cheap and carbon created largely unmanaged and almost completely unaccounted for.

The fact that all this hardware then has such scarily fashionably short life spans before it ends up as e waste adds to the importance of us being honest about the true costs of our consumption. A lot of the contemporary electronics that are marketed as efficient in energy usage require technology that is not necessarily energy efficient to create.

The data available for full life cycle energy assessment is growing now as we start to try and shift our processes to truly less carbon intensive industry on the planet.
 
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Alrainbow

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Where is methane or hydrogen or pnomonia power cells.
oh there not ready yet lol. Yet all 3 of these have been around for 70 years or so
 

Atmasphere

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I think class d listening is like drinking instant coffee… I don’t. Each to their own but I’d rather not listen to class d amps or drink instant coffee. That said I don’t believe we are all chasing the same thing and I am fine with the fact that I’m out of step and more musicphile (lover of music) than audiophile (lover of sound)… the choice of any gear for sonic or cost efficient preferences is just less important to me.

But I never struggle with the realisation that we are all here to be true to our own visions of what this hobby is all about. I’m a music first listener and access to the best music and connection to musical performance is my primary goal. Sonics are important but holistic music appreciation is an overriding factor for me. I might be broken but class d has always resulted in a disconnect for me. I can only guess at why.

The power consumption of our class A triode OTLs has always bothered me. About 6 years ago I heard a class D amplifier that convinced me that we had better figure the technology out. We've been researching it ever since.

Last year we started selling our class D amp. It uses our own module of our own design- everything about this amp was designed and built in-house. I felt it was sending the wrong message to use someone else's module since we had the expertise in-house.

Our triode class A OTLs have gotten many rave reviews and also awards in the high end audio press. Of course we've compared our class D to our OTLs, as have our customers, local audiophiles and the like. They all say the same thing: it has the same smooth involving quality of our OTLs in the mids and highs but a bit easier ('more focused') to tell what's happening in the rear of the soundstage (this likely owing to lower distortion which obscures detail).

I'm of the opinion that tube power amps are on borrowed time and that any high end audio amplifier company that does not have a class D project in the works will get left behind.

Its a Bad Idea to write off an entire technology simply because the examples you ran into weren't up to snuff. I didn't take class D seriously 20 years ago because all the examples I ran into seemed like a joke. But I have kept an eye on the technology and its been steadily improving. Its no longer 'instant coffee'- its the real thing starting with hand-picked beans roasted to perfection, ground properly and steeped for that Ahhh! moment.

Today there are a number of class D amps out there that are worthy of attention by any audiophile whether you prefer SETs, class A amplifiers, or whatever. They have gotten that good. Take it from someone that has been about as dedicated to class A and tubes as it gets, walking that talk for nearly 50 years: if you know what you are doing as a designer, you can make a class D amp that is every bit as good (if not better) as the best of tubes and/or the best of class A amplifiers. To really do that, you have to also understand what is important to the ear and so which measurements are important to get right.
 

aLLeARS

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As someone who has been using Ralph's new class-D mono-blocks with 99dB efficient horn speakers for over a year now, I can attest to his description of the sound of this amp compared to his OTL class-A tube designs. I went from fully optimized M60 OTL's with select tubes to his new class-D and feel absolutely no need to go back to tubes. After experiencing this amplifier, I agree that class-D is the future for hi-fidelity amplifier design. Ralph's first class-D amplifier is already on par with his best tube designs. The future for class-D is bright.
 

Kingrex

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Ralph, this may be a stupid question. I don't know how class D amps are made. Is there a hybrid where the front end is tube and the power end is Class D.
 

the sound of Tao

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The power consumption of our class A triode OTLs has always bothered me. About 6 years ago I heard a class D amplifier that convinced me that we had better figure the technology out. We've been researching it ever since.

Last year we started selling our class D amp. It uses our own module of our own design- everything about this amp was designed and built in-house. I felt it was sending the wrong message to use someone else's module since we had the expertise in-house.

Our triode class A OTLs have gotten many rave reviews and also awards in the high end audio press. Of course we've compared our class D to our OTLs, as have our customers, local audiophiles and the like. They all say the same thing: it has the same smooth involving quality of our OTLs in the mids and highs but a bit easier ('more focused') to tell what's happening in the rear of the soundstage (this likely owing to lower distortion which obscures detail).

I'm of the opinion that tube power amps are on borrowed time and that any high end audio amplifier company that does not have a class D project in the works will get left behind.

Its a Bad Idea to write off an entire technology simply because the examples you ran into weren't up to snuff. I didn't take class D seriously 20 years ago because all the examples I ran into seemed like a joke. But I have kept an eye on the technology and its been steadily improving. Its no longer 'instant coffee'- its the real thing starting with hand-picked beans roasted to perfection, ground properly and steeped for that Ahhh! moment.

Today there are a number of class D amps out there that are worthy of attention by any audiophile whether you prefer SETs, class A amplifiers, or whatever. They have gotten that good. Take it from someone that has been about as dedicated to class A and tubes as it gets, walking that talk for nearly 50 years: if you know what you are doing as a designer, you can make a class D amp that is every bit as good (if not better) as the best of tubes and/or the best of class A amplifiers. To really do that, you have to also understand what is important to the ear and so which measurements are important to get right.
Ralph obviously you like what you hear from class d amps enough to invest in making one yourself. I’ve not heard your class d amp and it would be great to think it would be the one that breaks the mould.

I’ve not seen any evidence that tube amps are on borrowed time. What have you seen to make you say that?
 

adyc

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The power consumption of our class A triode OTLs has always bothered me. About 6 years ago I heard a class D amplifier that convinced me that we had better figure the technology out. We've been researching it ever since.

Last year we started selling our class D amp. It uses our own module of our own design- everything about this amp was designed and built in-house. I felt it was sending the wrong message to use someone else's module since we had the expertise in-house.

Our triode class A OTLs have gotten many rave reviews and also awards in the high end audio press. Of course we've compared our class D to our OTLs, as have our customers, local audiophiles and the like. They all say the same thing: it has the same smooth involving quality of our OTLs in the mids and highs but a bit easier ('more focused') to tell what's happening in the rear of the soundstage (this likely owing to lower distortion which obscures detail).

I'm of the opinion that tube power amps are on borrowed time and that any high end audio amplifier company that does not have a class D project in the works will get left behind.

Its a Bad Idea to write off an entire technology simply because the examples you ran into weren't up to snuff. I didn't take class D seriously 20 years ago because all the examples I ran into seemed like a joke. But I have kept an eye on the technology and its been steadily improving. Its no longer 'instant coffee'- its the real thing starting with hand-picked beans roasted to perfection, ground properly and steeped for that Ahhh! moment.

Today there are a number of class D amps out there that are worthy of attention by any audiophile whether you prefer SETs, class A amplifiers, or whatever. They have gotten that good. Take it from someone that has been about as dedicated to class A and tubes as it gets, walking that talk for nearly 50 years: if you know what you are doing as a designer, you can make a class D amp that is every bit as good (if not better) as the best of tubes and/or the best of class A amplifiers. To really do that, you have to also understand what is important to the ear and so which measurements are important to get right.
I can’t find your class D amp in your website. Can you point out the link?
 

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